Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Brandywine River Museum of Art

June 24 through September 17, 2017

Seattle Art Museum

October 19, 2017 through
January 15, 2018

Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect, a
once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of iconic works by this master painter,
commemorates the centennial of the artist’s birth. It will include over
100 works spanning his entire career, from the early works that quickly
established his reputation to his final painting, Goodbye,
completed months before his death in 2009. The Brandywine is the only
East Coast venue for the exhibition and the only location where visitors
can immerse themselves in the world of Wyeth through tours of his
studio and Kuerner Farm. Public tours of these locations add insight to
his work offering an intimate look at the personal space of this very
private artist and an opportunity to see the farm, which inspired nearly
1,000 works of art.

Wyeth’s life extended from World War I—a period that sparked the
imagination of the artist as a young boy—to the new millennium. He once
said that painting to him was “following a long thread leading like time
to change and evolution.” This comprehensive retrospective follows that
thread over the decades as it unwinds, progressing forward and at times
altering course. The exhibition will offer new interpretations of his
work, noting the significance, for example, of such influences as
popular film and images of war, and on the relatively unstudied but
numerous portrayals of African Americans from the Chadds Ford community.
Visitors will also be given a view into Wyeth’s working process through
studies rarely exhibited in the artist’s lifetime and through
comparisons of Wyeth’s widely divergent approaches to watercolor—which
inspired him to paint quickly and with abandon at times—and to tempera—a
more controlled medium in which he built up paint slowly and
deliberately.

Co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, Andrew Wyeth in Retrospect examines four major periods in the artist’s career:

1935-1949: This section looks at Wyeth’s emerging
presence in the art world—from the colorful, expressive watercolors of
the Maine coast that reveal a debt to Winslow Homer and brought him to
the attention of the art world in the late 1930s, to his early forays
into the medium of tempera, and to the powerful, dramatic works of the
mid to late 1940s.

Highlights include Lobsterman (1937), painted the summer before his first, momentous New York show;

his early temperas, such as Frog Hunters (1941)—which was featured in the landmark Museum of Modern Art show, Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists;

and the now iconic works—such as Winter 1946 (1946)—that
were crafted after October 1945, when the death of his father caused a
profound shift in Andrew Wyeth’s outlook on his art.

1950-1967: By 1950, Wyeth’s attention was focused on
his own visceral responses to the landscape around his home in Chadds
Ford, and Maine, most particularly the Christina Olson property and the
coastline. Wyeth divided his time between these places. In Chadds Ford,
he painted the Kuerner Farm (now part of the Brandywine River Museum of
Art), which was long at the center of Wyeth’s world there and forever
linked in his mind to the nearby railroad crossing where his father,
N.C. Wyeth, had met a tragic death. He also painted friends who were the
last of the Black community that had been established in Chadds Ford
during the Civil War. In Maine, Wyeth expressed his compelling emotional
connection to the siblings Christina and Alvaro Olson and their house
and property in Cushing.

Significant works from this period include

Northern Point (1950);

Miss Olson (1952);

and Spring Fed
(1967).

Examples of Wyeth’s extensive studies in pencil and watercolor
of his African American subjects

Tom Clark,

Adam Johnson, and

Willard
Snowden (The Drifter, 1967), are also included.

1968-1988: By now one of America’s most famous artists, in
1968 Wyeth began to explore the realm of erotic art. This is the period
that saw his first extended series of nudes, of the adolescent Siri
Erickson in Maine and of Helga Testorf in Chadds Ford. The paintings of
Helga, famously kept secret by the artist until the mid-1980s, when
their revelation created a national sensation, have occupied an outsize
place in the narrative of Wyeth’s multi-decade career. The exhibition
will show that while he was working on these nude subjects, he also
painted for public view some of his most psychologically complex,
symbolically rich, and compositionally ambitious works. Highlights
include the now iconic paintings focused on his neighbors, the Kuerners:
examples are

Evening at Kuerners (1970);

The Kuerners (1971);

and Spring (1979).

1989-2009: Beginning in 1989, Wyeth’s work became
particularly self-reflective as he looked backward—partly in response to
the critical backlash he experienced from the revelation of the Helga
paintings. His late works are often infused with mystery and a surreal
quality, recalling his earliest work and at times, in fact, directly
referencing it.

Highlights include the large tempera Snow Hill (1989), filled with autobiographical allusions,

andGoodbye (2008), a painting completed just months before his death that has not been widely seen or published.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be co-published by
Yale University Press, the Brandywine River Museum of Art and the
Seattle Art Museum. It will provide a full visual document of the works
in the exhibition, as well as lay out the first detailed timeline of
Wyeth’s career. In addition to Patricia Junker’s insightful contextual
analysis of the four periods described above, the catalogue will include
seven provocative essays on key aspects of Wyeth’s work by scholars
from both the United States and Japan. The catalogue is intended to be a
foundation for subsequent Wyeth studies.

The co-curators for the exhibition are Audrey Lewis, Curator,
Brandywine River Museum of Art, and Patricia Junker, the Ann M. Barwick
Curator of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum. The exhibition will
be on view at the Seattle Art Museum from October 19, 2017 through
January 15, 2018.

This March, the Dallas Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Mexican Secretariat of Culture, hosts the exclusive U.S. presentation of México 1900–1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde,
a sweeping survey featuring almost 200 works of painting, sculpture,
photography, drawings, and films that document the country’s artistic
Renaissance during the first half of the 20th century. Curated by
Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s new Eugene McDermott Director, and the result
of a combined cultural endeavor between Mexico and France, this major
traveling exhibition showcases the work of titans of Mexican Modernism
alongside that of lesser-known pioneers, including a number of rarely
seen works by female artists, to reveal the history and development of
modern Mexico and its cultural identity.

On view from March 12 through July 16, 2017, México 1900–1950 will
be enhanced in Dallas by the inclusion of key works from the Museum’s
own exquisite collection of Mexican art, encompassing over 1,000 works
that span across three millennia. The exhibition, which premiered in
October 2016 at the Grand Palais in Paris to both popular and critical
acclaim, is organized by the Secretaría de Cultura/Instituto Nacional de
Bellas Artes/Museo Nacional de Arte, México (MUNAL) and the Réunion des
musées nationaux – Grand Palais (Rmn-GP) of France.

“The DMA has a rich history of collecting and presenting Mexican art,
and this exhibition offers our visitors the opportunity to explore
in-depth the diverse and vibrant voices that distinguish Mexican art
during the first half of the 20th century,” said Arteaga. “México 1900–1950 showcases
not only the greats of Mexican art but also those who may have been
eclipsed on the international level by names like Rivera and Kahlo. The
exhibition helps broaden our understanding of what modern Mexican art
means, and diversify the artistic narratives attributed to the country.”

Organized thematically and presented in both English and Spanish, México 1900–1950 reveals
how Mexican 20th-century art is both directly linked to the
international avant-garde and distinguished by an incredible
singularity, forged in part by the upheaval and transformation caused by
the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. The exhibition begins with
an introduction to the 19th-century imagery and traditions that
pre-dated and, in turn, inspired Mexican Modernism, and includes work
produced by Mexican artists living and working in Paris at the turn of
the century. It then examines how the Revolution helped cement both a
new national identity and a visual culture in Mexico, as embodied most
famously by the murals of Rivera, Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

At the same time, México 1900–1950 goes beyond these mythic
artists to reveal alternative narratives in Mexican art, including a
significant emphasis on the work of female artists, who were supported
by patrons like Dolores Olmedo and María Izquierdo. The thematic section
“Strong Women” includes work by Frida Kahlo and her lesser-known but
equally distinguished compatriots, including artists like Nahui Olin,
photographer Tina Modotti, multidisciplinary artist Rosa Rolanda, and
photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo, among others.

Representing the response
of Mexican artists to art movements from around the world with a
cosmopolitan vision, the exhibition also features the artwork of
abstract sculptor German Cueto, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Abraham Ángel,
Roberto Montenegro and Rufino Tamayo.

A final section reveals the
cross-pollination specifically between American and Mexican artists and
the resulting profound effect this had on art production in both
countries.

The Dallas presentation, in partnership with the Latino Center for
Leadership Development and with support from Patrón Tequila, gathers
perhaps for the first time in decades mural-sized works by Diego Rivera,
José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Saturnino Herrán, Miguel
Covarrubias, and Roberto Montenegro.

El Sueño de la Malinche (The Dream of La Malinche) (1939) by Antonio Ruiz
As part of the exhibition, highlights from the DMA collection include, among others:

Perro Itzcuintli conmigo (Itzcuintli Dog with Me) (1933) by Frida Kahlo,
an oil-on-canvas self-portrait of the artist with a hairless dog, a
long-term loan to the Museum, was likely painted at the artist’s home in
Mexico City and completed immediately before her solo debut in New
York;

El Hombre (Man) by Rufino Tamayo,
a portable mural of a man reaching toward a shooting star that was
commissioned by the DMA in 1953 reflects the Museum’s early interest in
and dedication to expanding its collection of Latin American paintings;
and

Génesis, el Don de la Vida (Genesis, the Gift of Life), the iconic 60-foot-long glass mosaic mural by Miguel Covarrubias
on permanent view at the DMA; originally created for another building
in Dallas in 1954, the work is based on an ancient Mexican myth that
four worlds preceded the world we currently live in, and incorporates
imagery from numerous historic cultures in Central and North America.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue,
coordinated by the DMA and the Secretaría de Cultura/Instituto Nacional
de Bellas Artes. It is edited by Agustín Arteaga and available in both
English and Spanish, a nod to the language of México 1900–1950 and
a continuation of Dr. Arteaga’s initiatives to include multilingual
materials across a variety of formats in DMA exhibitions. The book,
translated from the original French is distributed by Yale University
Press in English and by Ediciones El Viso in Spanish.

Manet, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin… the Glyptotek’s
collection of French painting contains works by some of the greatest
figures in art, just as it covers one of the most hectic epochs in art
history. With over 200 works the exhibition displays the artistic
diversity, which poured forth from France in the years 1809-1950.
Through an original presentation of famous masterpieces and rarely seen
major works the exhibition presents a visual narrative of 150 years of
art which never manages to put down roots, and, for the same reason, is
suffused with intensity and invention.

The Art Superpower

From the Romantic Period up to
the Second World War France was the meeting point for the most
innovative vanguard of artists. The accelerating modernity and cultural
broad-mindedness of Paris as well as the attraction of rural settings in
the provinces was the perfect climate for the most pioneering European
avant-garde. The exhibition’s paintings, drawings and small sculptures
bear witness to the fact that art in this period was, at times, a savage
quest for originality. These artists were driven by a powerful impulse
not merely to keep pace with, but also to be able to anticipate and
create the expression and form of the time.

Ideal and Experiment

The exhibition, which is
based exclusively on the Glyptotek’s own collection, spans the whole
range in the development of art from the academic to the so-called
modern. From the idealised painterly expression with its considerable
technical wealth of detail, via the freer, experimental paintings, to
full-blooded abstraction. In this way the exhibition sums up the many
stylistic currents of the period: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, and,
most of all, Impressionism.

Backwards: 1950-1809

However, the development is
far from linear and the art has a tendency to run rings around itself.
The artists typically worked outside art historical categories. They
moved in and out of the various groups, drew inspiration from their
travels and, all in all, worked more dynamically and unpredictably.

The exhibition extends over three floors and juxtaposes artists,
genres and techniques with chronology as the governing principle. It is,
in fact, the chronology which briefly liberates painting from the
constraints of being too closely associated with certain styles and has
it assume the foreground as painting first and foremost. To further
underline the free approach of the artists the exhibition is arranged
according to a reverse chronology. Far from standing as a natural final
destination, the modern painting of the 20th century becomes an
introduction to a reversed stroll through the art of painting from the
19th century.

Friday, March 24, 2017

The Hyde Collection

February 28 through June 11, 2017

Childe
Hassam’s ‘Geraniums,’ painted in 1888/89, is part of The Hyde’s
permanent collection and one of the work’s featured in its current show.

When Childe Hassam returned to the United States after
living in Paris for three years, he brought with him an American form of
Impressionism. His Hyde House favorite Geraniums
will be exhibited — along with the works of other American artists
who found inspiration overseas — in American
Artists in Europe: Selections from the Permanent Collection, which
opened Tuesday, February 28,in The Hyde Collection's Whitney-Renz Gallery.

The featured works are drawn from the Museum's permanent
collection, highlighting American artists inspired by their travels.
"Americans go as students or as established artists, but they both come
back with distinctly American versions of movements they encountered in
Europe," said Jonathan Canning, Curator of The Hyde.

Forebodings by Winslow Homer, Hyde Collection

When, for example, Winslow Homer tired of painting Americans, he
traveled overseas in 1881 in search of strong-willed women exuding natural
beauty. The revered painter found his muses on the rough shores of
Cullercoats, England. He came back to the States with the subjects that would
come to dominate his later years, fisherfolk and the power of the sea.

Before the Civil War, America lacked the cultural
equivalents of artists' cafes, salons, and the Bohemian lifestyle that made
Europe the center of Western culture. "Artists traveled wanting to see
Europe's great cities, art collections, and monuments," Canning said.
"It wasn't until after the war that Americans started to develop art
academies and cultural institutions of their own."

American Artists in Europe: Selections from the Permanent
Collection features
works from Hassam; Homer, who traveled to England twice in the mid-1800s;

Duveneck Frank Florentine Flower Girl

Frank
Duveneck, who traveled and taught extensively in Italy and Germany;

Elihu
Vedder, who found inspiration in Italy and eventually lived there permanently;

The American photographer William Eggleston (1939, Memphis Tennessee, US) is widely considered one of the leading photographers of the past decades. He has been a pioneer of colour photography from the mid-1960s onwards, and transformed everyday America into a photogenic subject. In William Eggleston – Los Alamos, Foam displays his portfolio of photographs that were taken on various road trips through the southern states of America between 1966 and 1974. The exhibition includes a number of iconic images, amongst which Eggleston’s first colour photograph.

Los Alamos starts in Eggleston’s home town of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta and continues to follow his wanderings through New Orleans, Las Vegas and south California, ending at Santa Monica Pier. During a road trip with writer and curator Walter Hopps, Eggleston also passed through Los Alamos, the place in New Mexico where the nuclear bomb was developed in secret and to which the series owes its name.

The over 2200 images made for Los Alamos were originally intended to be published in parts, but were forgotten over the years. The photographs were rediscovered almost 40 years after the project started. They were published and exhibited for the first time in 2003. The vibrant photographs of traffic signs, run-down buildings and diner interiors distinctly betray the hand of the wayward autodidact. His early work evidences his penchant for the seemingly trivial: before the lens of Eggleston’s ‘democratic camera’, everything becomes equally important.

Eggleston began Los Alamos ten years before his contested solo exhibition at MoMA in 1976, which placed colour photography on the map as a serious art form. At the time, colour photography in the fine arts was regarded as frivolous, or even vulgar. It earned Eggleston the scorn of many. However, this did not stop him from experimenting with the no longer used dye-transfer process, a labour-intensive and expensive technique that was mainly used in advertising photography. The process allowed the photographer to control the colour saturation and achieve an unparalleled nuance in tonality; a quality that also characterizes the 75 dye-transfer prints exhibited at Foam.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

4 March to 17 September 2017

The exhibition Calm and Exaltation. Van Gogh in the
Bührle Collection presents eight paintings by Vincent van Gogh. This selection
allows us to see not only the different phases in the Dutch artist’s career,
but also the vision of a collector, the Swiss industrialist Emil Bührle
(1890–1956), for whom it was crucial that his collection should convey the
stylistic development of each artist represented within it. Thus the thread
running through his dazzling acquisitions of works by Van Gogh is the
lightening and brightening of Vincent’s palette and his synthesis of different
influences in his art.

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles has been granted
the loan of six canvases from the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zürich,
which holds in all seven works by Van Gogh.

and Blossoming Chestnut Branches (both 1890) testify to the artistic maturity
that Vincent attained at the end of his career.

In Blossoming Chestnut Branches , Van Gogh shows us the exaltation of spring. The
brushwork is resolutely energetic, the colours vibrant and the composition bold
in its horizontality.

Vincent’s extended stay in Provence is represented by two
loans respectively issuing from a private collection and the Van Gogh Museum
in Amsterdam. Although the clear light and bright colours of the South found
their way into his paintings of this period, in

Entrance to a Quarry (1889) Van
Gogh returns to the more sombre palette he had favoured in the North.

Writing to his brother Theo on 22 August 1889, Vincent says of Entrance
to a Quarry :

“And it was precisely a more sober attempt, matt in colour without looking impressive, broken
greens, reds and rusty ochre yellows, as I told you that from time to time I
felt a desire to begin again with a palette like the one in the north.”

This
palette of the North is that of the earth, made up of ochres and dark greens. Vincent
van Gogh,

With Olive
Orchard (1889), likewise painted in the countryside around Saint-Rémy, one of
the artist’s favourite Provençal motifs takes its place in the exhibition.

Exhibition
curators: Bice Curiger, Lukas Gloor

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Vincent van Gogh is born
on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert in the Netherlands. At the age of 16 he joins
Goupil & C ie , a firm of art dealers in The Hague, and subsequently works in
the company’s offices in Brussels, London and finally Paris. He gradually loses interest in the
commercial art world and, in 1878–79, he becomes a lay preacher in a mining
community in the Borinage area of Belgium.

In August 1880 Van Gogh decides to
become an artist. He wants to be a painter of everyday life, and, above all, of
peasant life, following in the footsteps of artists such as Jean-François
Millet. Landscapes and still lifes, too, become an important part of his
oeuvre.

In 1886 in Paris he discovers Japanese prints and he meets
Impressionist artists. Convinced that colour is the key to modernity, Van Gogh
leaves for Provence in search of bright light and vibrant colours.

Dreaming of
establishing a community of artists, in February 1888 he settles in Arles.
Gauguin joins him in October, but their collaboration collapses in late
December 1888.

Disappointed and ill, in May 1889 Van Gogh has himself admitted
to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, where he remains for a whole year. He continues
with his search for an expressive art based on colour and brush strokes,
creating more than 500 paintings and drawings during his 27 months in Provence.

In May 1890 Van Gogh moves to Auvers-sur-Oise, where in just over two months he
produces the final 70 paintings of
an oeuvre that comprises more than 2,000 works. He dies on 29 July 1890 at the age
of 37. Van Gogh’s artistic genius
and the poignant story of his life transform him into a veritable international
icon.

During his stay
at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint- Rémy-de-Provence,
Van Gogh turns to the surrounding countryside to enrich his geography as an
artist. He tirelessly paints and draws new Provençal motifs: cypress trees,
olive groves and hills. The low Alpilles range rising behind the hospital
buildings provides Vincent with an opportunity to paint the rugged massif as well
as the quarry located nearby. In 1889 he treats this latter in two canvases, of
which he executes the first in
mid-July – just after suffering a fresh health crisis – and the second in
October.

The McNay Art Museum is proud to present
Monet to Matisse:
A Century of French Moderns
(March 1 to June 4, 2017) in its newly reconfigured Tobin
Exhibition Galleries. Curated by McNay Director Richard Aste and
Brooklyn Museum Curator of European Painting and Sculpture Lisa Small,
the exhibition includes nearly 60 paintings and sculptures from
Brooklyn’s renowned European art collection as well as selections from
the McNay’s prized holdings.

“Bringing Brooklyn’s French collection to
the McNay is a reunion decades in the making,” says Aste. “Our founder,
Marion Koogler McNay, was a visionary collector. Putting her keen
collecting eye back on a par with those of her mostly male peers at the
Brooklyn Museum, one of the nation’s pioneering art institutions, is
powerful, appropriate, and long overdue.”

At the McNay, Monet to Matisse is
organized by René Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator/Curator of
Contemporary Art, and Heather Lammers, Director of Collections and
Exhibitions.

Indeed, the McNay boasts artworks from the same era—Modernism—and by many of the same artists featured in
Monet to Matisse. To reinforce collecting-practice parallels
between the McNay and Brooklyn and to highlight the McNay’s growing
Modern art collection, the Museum is introducing paintings, sculptures,
and prints typically exhibited in the main collection galleries to the
Tobin Exhibition Galleries, along with key works on loan from private
collectors. Notable examples include:

An iconic suite of ten Mary Cassatt aquatints, graciously donated to
the McNay by prominent philanthropist and collector Margaret Batts Tobin
in 1977

.

Claude Monet masterpiece
Nympheas (Water Lilies)

An arresting Paris-made still life by African American painter Lois
Mailou Jones on loan from the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for
the Arts.

Frederick Carl Frieseke’s
The Bathers, an exquisite painting on loan from the collection of Marie and Hugh Halff.

Also on view in the McNay’s Charles Butt Paperworks Gallery is the complementary exhibition Sur Papier: Works on Paper by Renoir, Chagall, and Other French Moderns, drawn entirely from the Museum’s renowned prints and drawings collection.

Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns celebrates
France as a major artistic center of international Modernism from the
mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. At the time, the genres of portraiture,
landscape, the still life, and the nude were redefined in radical ways.
The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in this presentation
exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined a hundred years,
spanning early attempts to faithfully capture everyday life and
concluding with introspective reflections of a disrupted landscape,
beginning with the reign of naturalism and ending with the rise of
abstraction.

Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns is
accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, co-authored by Rich Aste and
Lisa Small, the exhibition’s organizers from the Brooklyn Museum. The
catalogue includes an introductory essay (with a general overview of the
exhibition and relevant social and artistic histories), brief thematic
essays, and short interpretive entries on individual works of art.